Recently released testing results in western Pennsylvania, upstream from Pittsburgh, reveal evidence of radioactive contamination in water flowing from an abandoned mine. Experts say that the radioactive materials may have come from illegal dumping of shale fracking wastewater.
Regulators had previously found radioactivity levels that exceeded EPA‘s drinking water standards over 60-fold in waters in the same area, which is roughly 3 miles upstream from a drinking water intake, but those test results were only made public after a local environmental group obtained them through open records requests.
At the end of July, the West Virginia Water Research Institute released the results from its tests of water flowing from an abandoned coal mine.
Most of the sampling results showed no detectable radioactivity, but one test result showed roughly 13 picocuries per liter (pci/l) of gross alpha radioactivity, just below EPA‘s drinking water limits, confirming the presence of radioactive materials in the mine’s discharge.
“There’s something going on there that’s not right,” Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the West Virginia Water Research Institutetold the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “The radiation, together with higher bromide levels than you would expect to see coming out of a deep mine, point to drilling wastewater.”
In April 2014, under pressure from local environmental groups, the state Department of Environmental Protection had taken samples from same mine, the Clyde Mine in Washington County, PA, as it discharged into 10 Mile Creek, a popular destination for boaters and fishermen.
Those tests showed one sample with radioactive materials (specifically radium 226 and radium 228) totaling 327 pci/l at and a second totaling 301 pci/l — in other words, up to 65 times the radium levels that the EPA considers safe in drinking water.
Some had speculated that the 2014 test results could simply have been flukes or false positives, a claim that seems less likely now that the subsequent round of testing by independent researchers also showed the presence of radioactivity.
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